Will Air France Crash Prompt End Of Black Boxes?

Here's a thought that's occurred to many people over the years after airplane crashes, especially those in the ocean: instead of recording aircraft flight data onto so-called black boxes that can be lost forever, the current fear in the Air France 447incident, why not stream in real-time data to engineers on the ground just like NASA does it with space craft?

In short, why are we still relying on black boxes which record data vital to understanding what's happened in airplane crashes?

That question was asked by some members of Public Broadcasting's NOVA production team after they made in 2004 "The Crash of Flight 111." That was a Swissair flight from New York to Geneva, Switzerland that crashed off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1998, killing 229 people.

While the flight recorders were recovered, they stopped six minutes before the plane impacted the ocean, greatly complicating the investigation which eventually concluded that a fire, perhaps caused by electrical arcing tied to the in-flight entertainment system ignited flammable material, causing a catastrophic fire aboard the aircraft.

In any event, an article on the PBS website by Peter Tyson examined the advantages of real-time telemetry over black boxes.

An excerpt:

The advantages to having continuous, real-time transmission of flight and cockpit information are many. First, in the case of a crash, black-box data would be available to investigators immediately. They wouldn't have to wait for the recorders to be dug out of the ground or fished from the seafloor. This has important implications in our age of terrorism. Authorities need to know quickly whether a crash was terrorist-related; suspect trails grow faint with each passing hour, much less the days or weeks it can take to recover black boxes and analyze their recordings.

And when black-box recordings are lost, as was the case with the two planes that struck the World Trade Center, downloaded data may be the only data. (I should note here that if Swissair Flight 111 had had a real-time data link, it would have quit operating at the same moment as its flight and cockpit recorders. Like black boxes, data-link systems would rely on a plane's electrical power, which the Flight 111 pilots shut off during their attempt to isolate and fight the fire that eventually brought the plane down.)

A robust data link would also mean a lot more information than just black-box data could flow, and it could flow both ways. As it is now, aircraft, particularly when flying over oceans, are often incommunicado for long periods. "Next to a remote desert island, it's about the only place you can hide and be out of touch," one aviation expert told me. With a broadband communications link, people in the air and on the ground could be in constant, detailed contact.

This would have clear benefits, most significantly the ability to cope with emergencies. If air-traffic controllers clearing aircraft for takeoff could glean pilot intent from incoming data, for example, they could reduce runway incursions, a leading cause of aircraft mishaps. "If you're polling this data every second, and you see that a pilot who hasn't been cleared is powering up and taking his foot off the brake, you know he's going to move," says Jay Brown, a computer scientist at the FAA Tech Center in Atlantic City, New Jersey. "With airplanes, it takes two or three seconds to get them to move, so you could potentially stop a runway incursion."

 

There are also some fairly cool ideas about how the transmitting of real-time data could be accomplished. One of the coolest would be to relay the information from airplane to airplane until it could down-linked to a ground station, according to the PBS article.

So with so many benefits, why aren't we much further down the path of having this sort of system deployed widely in aviation?

The cost-benefit issue is one answer. Crashes like Flight 447 are so rare that the there really hasn't been pressure on industry and regulators to abandon the outdated black box technology.

Another excerpt from the Tyson's article:

So what's the delay? Cost, for starters. "Purely from an accident investigation standpoint, airplanes almost never, ever crash," says Jim Cash, the NTSB's senior technical advisor for black boxes. "So to be continuously sending data off an airplane that could go its entire 40 or 50 years of flight service and never have an incident or accident—nobody's got that kind of money, especially the airline industry. It's still much cheaper to put a box on an airplane and just have it run its merry life recording data that nobody will ever look at."

But if Flight 447's recorders aren't recovered, which looks highly likely according to French and other officials, perhaps it will raise calls for newer technology to finally be employed.

Tyson quotes an aviation expert in his piece who makes a point that's eerie this week's the Airbus 330 crash.

Despite the hurdles to wireless transmission, it may not be too far off. Aviation specialist Paul Czysz, a professor emeritus at St. Louis University, believes that all it would take to spur an official drive for a telemetry system would be the crash of a major jetliner over mid-ocean in which the black boxes were unrecoverable—"a Titanic event," as he calls it. "You're going to have to have something like this," Czysz says of a real-time data link, "just to make sure you know what happened."

As Czysz suggested, it took the Titanic's sinking for governments and mariners to institute routine iceberg patrols and to place enough lifeboats for all the passengers and crew on ocean-going vessels.

It may be that the Air France crash will provide the final impetus to put the era of searching the ocean waters for black boxes behind us.